After the End Times
by Sempathy
Summary: Set just after the end of Blackout, this is the story of Shaun and Georgia's new life together.
1. Chapter 1 - Shaun

"Get back on the bike, Shaun."  
_Get back on the bike, Shaun._

She - they - damn. This still wasn't getting any easier, grammatically speaking. George spoke simultaneously, inside my head and from behind me. She had been doing that more recently; my hallucination syncing up with the real George. Or, the 97% real one, anyway.

It should have been irritating, and the weird, stereo effect was disorienting at times, but on the whole I found the phenomenon comforting.

It was reassuring to know that I had kept George with me as well as I could, that my haunting was somewhere in the region of 97% true to the sister I had lost. It helped, having regular reminders that I really had known her as well as I thought.

Reassuring, too, to know that whatever I had lost in that missing three percent wasn't important, not really. That ninety-seven percent was enough. Enough that my phantom George couldn't find fault with the cloned one.

I turned, taking my attention from the zombie I had been facing, but trusting that the baseball bat I held planted in the middle of its chest would keep it at bay while I flashed George - and the cameras she was wearing - what I hoped was a convincing facsimile of my classic, Irwin grin.

Once upon a time, I wouldn't have had to fake that grin. Once upon a time I wouldn't have been able to repress it. This, right here, was all I had ever wanted; dead things to poke, and my sister to watch my back. Except that when I'd lost my sister, I'd also lost the desire to be an Irwin. Zombies were less fun when you'd seen one wearing the face of the person you loved most in the world. It turned out that Shaun-the-Irwin was far harder to resurrect than George had been.

I counted in my head; one-two-three- all the way up until ten, before giving my undead playmate a rough shove with the bat, knocking it sprawling and giving me time to climb on the bike behind George and let her speed us both back to safety. The wait was crucial to maintaining the illusion that everything had returned to normal. Before the campaign, I never would have left the field as soon as George asked me to.

This charade was necessary, we had decided. If the world were to accept George's return to After the End Times - albeit as just another Newsie, since Mahir was running the show these days - then I had to return to my old, Irwin ways. I had been a constant throughout the months without George; a violent, crazy, and only occasionally lucid constant, but a constant nonetheless. George's return had been too widely broadcast for us to bring her on under an assumed name as another beta, and even after everything that has happened, she couldn't have given up the news any more than she could have given up breathing.

We decided that in order for the world to read her articles - read them for the facts that she was presenting, and not just for the thrills of reading words written by a dead girl - our whole net presence had to scream 'business as usual'. That way, we hoped, our readers would fall back on habits they had been forming since we were sixteen, and first started blogging seriously, and just read what she wrote, as though nothing had changed.

And business as usual meant I had to be an Irwin again.

We got back to the house and walked straight in, ignoring the blood testing unit we kept at the door strictly for appearances. It had taken money - a lot of it - to find an engineer willing to outfit the abandoned pre-rising house we had chosen to inhabit with only the security tech we chose to include. Yes to decontamination showers, and a unit to sterilise our clothes and equipment when we came in from the field, but no blood testing units, barring the one by the door, which wasn't linked in any way to the house security system.

My immunity had drastically reduced the risks I ran being in the field - a zombie pack could still kill me, of course, but I would never amplify. Unfortunately, it had also meant that the security tech which other people relied on to keep them safe was more likely to get me killed. While my body was in the throes of fighting off an infection of live Kellis-Amberlee, there was a good chance that I would test temporarily positive on a standard blood test. Immunity to zombies didn't also give me immunity to overzealous security systems, or the chance that regular positive test results coming from this address would start ringing alarm bells that we didn't want being rung.

So we'd found an engineer who needed cash and couldn't care less whether a couple of idiots wanted to design themselves a cosy little death trap to play happy families in. It had cost a lot to find him, and even more to encourage him to keep his mouth shut about it afterwards, but it had been worth it. It still cost, in fact. A monthly payment in excess of the annual operating budget of After the End Times, but worth every penny if it meant that we could live in peace.

Not that we paid it, we couldn't have, but presidential gratitude has its advantages, and neither George nor I had any qualms about taking every penny Ryman offered us. After all, we had paid in blood for his freedom and that of his family.

We sat back to back, leaning against each other as we edited our footage of the day. I had put a lot of thought into the design of our desks; where once we had been content enough, as long as we could hear each other, and had kept separate desks in our adjoining rooms at the Mason's house, my time without George had done its damage, and these days I tried to stay in physical contact with her as much as I could.

She handled my clingyness graciously enough, although she had never been particularly cuddly, and she hadn't complained when I'd created our huge, horseshoe-shaped desk, with a single circular seat in the middle where we could sit with our backs pressed together as we worked.

_You think I don't know what you're doing?_  
"Of course you know," I muttered, "you're inside my head."  
_Only partly. Don't you think I know you well enough to have figured it out? Even the part of me which doesn't have the power to read your mind?_  
"Talking to me again?" George asked absently from behind me. "You know, that works better when I can actually hear what you're saying."

She knew I was talking to the other George, the one in my head, but she didn't seem to mind. Both Georges had begun to refer to each other as though they were one entity, and I had no idea how I should feel about that. Those doctors that I'd seen, in the first, awful months after George's death, had talked about integrating that rogue part of my mind which thought of itself as my sister. They had regarded integration as an essential step on the road to stability; I don't think this was quite the sort of integration they were talking about, though.

I could guess the reason that George was so intent on claiming my haunting as her own; she had never stopped worrying about that three percent, that missing jigsaw piece in her identity which I had come to terms with almost as soon as she had returned to me, but which I could tell still bothered her.

The George in my head - how much did she count for? A hundredth? A fiftieth? If the CDC had measured my brain, matched it against their perfect copy of my dead sister, the copy they had measured my George against, and given her a score of ninety-seven out of a hundred, would they find my phantom George in there somewhere? And if they did, how much space did she occupy? Could it be as much as three percent? If George accepted my phantom as a part of her, albeit a part not resident in her own mind, would that tip the scales and make her enough?

She had always been enough for me, but I was an Irwin, or had been. She was a Newsie, and truth had always held a different meaning for her. There was no such thing as 'enough'. She wasn't completely true, and she knew it, and the part of her that still saw the world in black and white, even after all this time, couldn't regard not-completely-true as anything except false.

I realised I hadn't replied to George, to either of her, and made a vague noise of agreement which would serve as a response to both her questions.

"What are we talking about?" George asked.  
"You're telling me that I'm an idiot,"  
"You are," _You are,_ she said evenly, her voice in my head a scant half second behind the one in my ears.  
"Thanks"  
"Any particular reason why I'm pointing this out to you?"  
"You're saying that I'm dumb for thinking that you haven't figured out why I'm so clingy these days."  
"You mean, aside from my extreme irresistability?"  
"I'm pretty sure that's not a word, George. Yes, aside from that."  
"Shaun..." her voice was serious now, "yes. I know what you're doing. Or I think I do. You think that if we spend enough time in close proximity to each other, you'll be able to give me your immunity."  
_Told you so._  
"You gave it to me in the first place, why shouldn't I return the favour?"  
"That took years, Shaun. I developed retinal KA when I was a child. Besides, what if it only works on children? My immune system is only a couple of years old, but it lives in an adult body. Maybe it can't learn from outside antibodies the way yours did."  
I felt my hands clench into fists, and realised with a curious detachment that I was angry. I'd never been angry at this George, not once since she'd come back.  
_Maybe this means we're finally getting back to normal._  
"Shut up, George." I snapped, not sure which one of them I was speaking to.  
"I'm not saying you shouldn't try -" she started, but I cut her off.  
"Good, because I wouldn't listen if you did."  
"I just don't want you to get your hopes up. If anything happens to me..." She didn't seem to be able to finish. I was glad, because even hearing her say that much made me feel like I'd swallowed a lump of ice.  
_If anything happens to me, I need to trust that you'll do what you did before, and make sure I can't hurt anyone._  
"I can't do that again." George was used to my conversational non-sequiteurs by now, and it didn't take a genius to work out what I meant.  
"The last thought I had before I died was how lucky I was to have you there to pull the trigger." I could hear tears in her voice, and I knew that if I dared to turn around and face her that I would see them on her cheeks.

I'd never made George cry before she'd died, and not just because she hadn't actually been able to then. We'd never really disagreed about much, except for the Masons, and I think she'd known that if I'd seen her crying over them, I would have done something drastic. If she ever did, she made sure I never saw it.  
I said nothing.  
"If it happens again, I need to know I can trust you."  
"I guess you're not that lucky anymore."  
"I'd do it for you."  
"That's easy to say; you know you'll never have to."  
"I still would."  
"I killed you, George. I stood there, and I pulled the trigger, and I watched your blood dry on the walls of our van. You died, and I wanted to go with you, but I didn't. I made myself live for you, I made myself live each day without you so that your death wouldn't be for nothing, and then some pretty blonde doctor wearing Buffy's clothes told me that you would have come back to me, and I had to live with the knowledge that I'd murdered you."  
"You did the right thing, Shaun."  
"The right thing? I killed you!"  
"Do you think I could have forgiven myself, or you, if you hadn't? You were trapped in the van with me, Shaun, and I was amplifying. Could you have held me off? You don't know how long it would have taken me to get better. If I'd woken up in that van with your blood on my hands knowing that you'd died because you hadn't loved me enough to put that bullet through my spine, I never would have forgiven you."  
"But you'd have lived."  
"I lived anyway. I'm right here, Shaun." I still wasn't facing her, but she had turned to face me. She wrapped her arms around me, and laid her head on my shoulder. I could feel her tears drying on my neck. "I couldn't have lived without you."  
"I had to."  
"I know, and I'm so sorry. I don't want to fight right now. Can we talk about this another time?"  
"There's no point talking about it. I won't change my mind."  
_I could change it for you._  
I didn't bother replying to that. Even if she could, George had too much integrity to do something like that. I was still angry; I had to force my fists to unclench so that I could get back to editing my footage. I wanted to storm off and be alone for a while, but I couldn't; she needed my antibodies too badly for me to spend time away from her when it wasn't utterly necessary.  
_I'll give you some space._ George faded until I could easily ignore her presence in the back of my head, and the other George let go of me and turned back around to get on with her work. It was as much distance as I could stand, and I carried on editing my footage, letting the relative solitude soothe my temper.


	2. Chapter 2 - Georgia

I could feel the tension in Shaun's body; it distracted me as I tried to focus my attention on the screen in front of me. The silence between us, usually so comfortable, was charged - both with the things we'd said, and the things we hadn't.

I'd known for some time that we would have to have this conversation. I had, in fact, been anxious to have it ever since I'd worked out that his clingyness wasn't just a side-effect of having lived without me - a corporeal me, at least - for so long. But I had never known how to bring it up. Well, lucky me, I'd brought it up for me.

Thoughts like that were the reason why it wasn't just Shaun's sanity I worried about at times. Yet thinking of Shaun's hallucinations as another part of me was the only way I'd been able to cope with the situation. Much as we both would have liked it if my return to the land of the living had given Shaun a similarly miraculous return to the land of the sane, it hadn't. For a while, it had driven me nuts - he spoke to his hallucinations as much as he did me. More, actually, since it appeared that in my absence he had gotten out of the habit of speaking to anyone outside of his own mind. My poor, broken boy.

After the initial honeymoon period, when the merest fact of each other's existence was no longer quite enough to make us both dumb with delight, the constant muttered conversations between them had started to irritate me, and worse, to make me jealous. Jealousy wasn't something either of us had ever encountered; there had had never been anyone with the slightest hope of breaking into our bond. Even when I found out about Shaun and Becks, I hadn't felt anything except pity for her.

Me, though, this other me, her I felt jealous of. She was the only person who could ever know Shaun better than I did. I wondered sometimes if she ever resented me. After all, she had been there through the dark times; when I was nothing more than a cluster of cells in a CDC petri dish, she had kept him going. Then, of course, I had to laugh at myself for thinking of her as, well, as a _her_ at all. She wasn't the real Georgia Mason, she was just some made up substitute.

Like me.

Being nothing but a made up thing myself, I had eventually acknowledged that I wasn't exactly in a position to start making judgements about the reality of other entities. If Tinkerbell walked into our office one day, I'd have sat her down and interviewed her.

So we'd come to some bizarre kind of truce. An unspoken one, obviously. Shaun might talk to the voice in his head, but I still couldn't quite bring myself to do the same. It didn't matter whether I thought of it as speaking to Shaun's hallucination, or as speaking to myself, either way constituted a level of crazy I wasn't quite ready to ascend to. I accepted her as a part of me, or rather, accepted us both as the remaining fragments of Georgia Mason, and from what Shaun had said, it sounded like she did the same. It was just another adjustment I had to make to living life as the clone of a dead girl.

My scars were gone; my eyes were normal; part of my me lived in my brother's head. In some ways it had been easier to get used to this than it had been to get used to not having retinal-KA anymore. After all, I still flinched when I stepped out into bright daylight; I'd stopped flinching when Shaun spoke to the other me a long time ago.

I shook my head and tried to focus on the article I was writing. It was an op-ed piece on whether I thought Ryman should run for a second term. My heart wasn't really in it, but, having been one of Ryman's original set of campaign bloggers, my readers had been clogging up the forums asking for this exact article for weeks now. I could live with that; I didn't like to let my readers dictate what I wrote, since it set a dangerous precedent, but my mods had been sounding more and more harried, and I'd decided that it was time to put them out of their misery. Most of them were volunteers, after all.

It seemed far too fast to me; from my perspective, Ryman had been in office for hardly any time at all - the first year or so of his term having passed in the eye-blink between when I had died, and when I had woken up in the CDC lab in Seattle. Time flies when you're dead. But the clock hadn't stopped ticking when my heart had stopped beating; people were starting to think about nominations, and that meant I had to think about it too. I wished I could pass this job to Shaun - after all, he was the only one of us who had seen the campaign through from start to finish, but I was the Newsie. The only thing his followers bugged him for was more footage of him trying to ride zombie moose, and - mods or no mods - they could keep asking as long as they liked, it still wasn't going to happen.

I looked at the time. Half an hour had passed in stony silence while I had been attempting to focus on this article. I was fairly sure that Shaun hadn't calmed down at all; I could hear his knuckles crack as he clenched and unclenched his fists. I wondered what I might be saying to him, if anything. Did the part of me I couldn't hear know the words to say to make things ok between us again? I certainly didn't.

Finally I couldn't stand the silence anymore.

"Shaun?" I asked, tentatively.  
"Don't," he replied, in a voice more weary than angry. That surprised me. "Just don't."  
"I didn't mean to..."  
"I said don't."  
His silence took on that strange quality which told me that he was listening to my voice in his head. I don't know quite how, but these days I could always tell.  
"I don't owe you anything!" He shouted. I said nothing. "I don't owe you anything," he said again, more softly. "You took the easy route, George, don't you see? You died, and then you came back, and you never once had to live in a world without me, but I had to live without you. I won't do it again. If..." He stopped for a long time, but I could tell he had more to say, and so I stayed quiet and waited.  
"If it happens again, if you amplify again, I won't kill you. I can't do it again. I can't, and I won't, and you have no right to ask me to. No one should have to kill their sister more than once. If I have to chain you in the cellar and feed you dead animals to keep the virus from destroying your body, I will. I'll do it, and then I'll sit there with you, all day, every day, until you catch your immunity back off me and get better. If it takes years, even if it takes decades, I'll wait for you to get better." I felt him turn to face me, but I didn't dare face him, not until I could work out how the hell I felt about what he'd just said.  
"The best part is," he continued, all jovial good humour now, "I could keep talking to you, and you'd still talk back. There are advantages to keeping a back-up copy of you - up here."  
"You're sick," I said, but I could hear in my voice that I wasn't serious.  
"'Course I am," he replied, "I'm a madman, and you're a clone. It's like living in one of those crazy pre-rising sitcoms." I sighed. It was no use trying to talk to him seriously when he was like this.  
"As long as it's one of the ones with a happy ending." I said eventually. "Now leave me alone, I need to work."  
"You haven't written a word in the last half hour. Come on, let's leave work alone for a while and have dinner." I turned to scowl at him; even though I had gained enough weight that I looked like myself again, and even fit back into the old clothes which Shaun had never been able to bring himself to throw away, he was still annoyingly solicitous of my health. Gone were the days when we'd work through until dawn and maybe grab a sandwich before passing out; these days I swear he spent more time and effort on my stomach than he did on our site. I kept telling him that I'd get too fat to run away from zombies if he didn't stop, but he just laughed, and told me there were more interesting ways to burn off the extra calories than playing tag with dead things. I couldn't exactly argue with that.  
"Tyrant," I growled, but I let him take my hand and lead me to the kitchen. The world could wait a little while longer.


End file.
